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AVG Free 9.0 released

As promised, AVG Technologies has now made a free version of its anti-virus scanner, AVG Free 9.0 for home users, available to download. Compared with the commercial products Anti-Virus Pro 9.0 and Internet Security 9.0, however, the free version lacks a behaviour-based threat detection feature, a dedicated games mode, extended anti-rootkit protection and the Web Shield safe web surfing component. According to AV-Test.org, the recently released Internet Security 9.0 achieved respectable protection results in the tests that it carried out.

The scanner's signature-based detection of known viruses, worms and trojans identified 97.64 per cent of the threats tested under Windows XP. In terms of adware and spyware, the tool detected 94 per cent of cases. When scanning more than 600,000 clean files, it didn't trigger a single false alarm. Disinfecting compromised PCs was successful in 24 out of 25 cases, although the scanner frequently didn't remove all the traces - one hosts file, for example, was left in a manipulated state.